Nature, Brain, and Culture

The robots will take your jobs - including psychologist's jobs - and will run your children's lives. People need to get up to date on this. To learn more, get a no cost copy of The Purple Robot Directory eBook at
http://jmerton.blogspot.com/2010/08/robot-site-directory-now-available.html

Perhaps AI researchers are jumping the gun by trying to reverse engineer mammalian brains at this stage. Perhaps they should start by trying to develop an "alien artificial intelligence" designed to perform reverse engineering functions. If researchers understand what they are doing day in day out to investigate the how brains function in their natural ecology then why can't they find the bottlenecks in their investigative processes and automate some of them? Maybe they can computer simulate key aspects of the evolutionary environment. It will take time to build such simulations but once in place they can be run a lot faster than the original evolutionary processes took place.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/moneta-a-mind-...

So this topic is in the news at the moment.

And certainly it is also my opinion that Kurzweil is hardly worth taking seriously.

But it is also obvious that a lot of people (for example DARPA, not to mention IBM systematically for a long time now, and HP [as in the link above]) are throwing a lot of money at topics in AI these days.

With regard to your article, imho the point you make about "which AI" is quite important, and this is an interesting way of making the point.

Here is a quote from your article: Making sense of the brain requires understanding the "nature" the animal sits within. [end]
Yes! This is a very good point. Pointing to the ethologists makes sense here. But I would like to add a word or two about the broader context in which ethology sits.

For one thing, imho it is a mistake to fail to notice that ethology came about to a certain extent as a reaction to Behaviorism (which, properly, is a part of biology--as, strictly speaking, psychology is). Ethology can be viewed as an attempt to view animal conditioning (etc) in its "natural context", as opposed to studying it in the laboratory. Behaviorism has left its imprint (sorry for the ethology metaphor) in many parts of biology / psychology. It is useful not to lose sight of this. Indeed, one example of this, rather unexpected I would say, is in the modern development of Learning Theory in statistics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning

At a more fundamental level the proper theory of living systems on Earth is biochemistry. It certainly ISN'T electronics, semiconductor "mechanics" or photonics. THE primary concept here is that of the cell, and, for eukaryotes, it seems that the evolutionary tree has a single stem. (The cell nucleus only came into existence once.) After this, one may pretty much trace DNA to Homo sapiens along a single path (in the evolutionary tree). The point here is that this may provide the basis for a program for reconstructing brain evolution (phylum Chordata) to humans. This may in the future make the problem of sorting out brain wiring, functionality, etc feasible. The time frame for this program might be considerably shorter than a millenium. (?)

In closing I wish to add what are, essentially, two footnotes.

For one thing, THE big difference between artificial systems using electronics, photonics, etc and biological systems is that the latter are, as Heinz ketchup says: Grown not made. [end] You only get new life from old life, in effect (with one exception in the beginning--or whatever). The "nature" the animal sits within is the biological system on Earth and, beyond that the physical / astronomical Solar System.

For the other thing, I may have already mentioned this in some earlier post on your blog, but I have a specific conjecture as to a "part" of the system of "artificial intelligence" which may turn out to be missing from electrical systems. It seems to me that QFT (Quantum Field Theory) may turn out to be implicated in some essential way in the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. It strikes me that humans may really have internal quantum phenomena which comprise vision which will be missed by "straightforward" electrical implementation of (Boolean) logic.

A possible hint here: photonics ... ?

Didn't Mrvin Minsky started AI in fifties, but yet we are not any closer.